Alan Turing — "Once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip…"
Once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers.
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Understanding this quote
What it means
When machines begin genuinely reasoning, they will quickly exceed human mental capacity. Turing is articulating what we now recognize as the AI acceleration problem — that machine cognition, once ignited, doesn't plateau. It compounds. Human intelligence is biologically capped; machine intelligence isn't. This is an early, clear-eyed prediction of superintelligence: not a fantasy, but a logical consequence of building systems that improve on the very cognitive processes we use to build them.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing spent his career defining machine intelligence. His landmark 1950 paper introduced the Turing Test to probe whether machines could match human thought. At Bletchley Park, he watched mechanical reasoning crack Nazi Enigma codes faster than any human team. This quote crystallizes his conviction — forged in theory and wartime practice — that machine cognition isn't speculative. It's an accelerating inevitability he had already partially set in motion himself.
The era
Turing wrote this in the early 1950s, just as the first true programmable computers — ENIAC, Manchester Mark 1 — proved machines could handle complex calculations. World War II had demonstrated that mechanical computation could outperform human analysts on codebreaking. The Cold War made machine intelligence a strategic priority. Yet society had no language for artificial intelligence; the term AI wouldn't exist until 1956. Turing was warning a world still amazed that machines could merely calculate.
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